Ebay adventures (pt 1 of 3)

Part of what I have been doing while avoiding the model room this August and September (besides doing lawnwork and dealing with one of the worst cases of bronchitis I can remember) is selling a few stash items on eBay.

This is mostly due to guilt. Having not worked fulltime for a considerable period, I am having all those psychological issues that we gentlemen of a certain age experience when we realize that no one is terribly interested in us anymore. Well, I’m sure they’ll get more interested when the US unemployment rate comes down from its current 8%+ range, but that is certainly where we are now. So my bright idea to generate some cash and not leave my wife as the only income source was to sell portions of my various collections.

The first trick is to decide what to part with. For the first round of selections, that really wasn’t a difficult process, since I selected kits that had been superseded, or items of which I had duplicates (which isn’t many, as I’ve noted before). About the only way to get a decent price on eBay in these down economic times is to be selling something that is long out of production. Honestly, I couldn’t believe how many listings there were for kits that are in current production, and the seller was asking close to MSRP, or even more than MSRP. With discount sellers like Sprue Bros, or foreign sellers like HLJ or Hannants, that just doesn’t make any sense. Why would I pay full price plus shipping, when I could go to one of the online sellers and make a better deal? Needless to say, most of the listings like this were not getting bids.

But luckily I have a number of British vacs from the 80s, including Contrail, Sutcliffe, Project X, and Esoteric. And some duplicates (not boxes, but the same sprues) of current rather expensive Hasegawa and Fujimi kits. There are even some ancient bagged Airfix items, and lots of old resin that has been replaced by injection molded kits. Also, I have gathered a fair amount of Liveries Unlimited airliner sheets that seem to be prized by the airliner modelling community. Little wonder, since they tend to be nice sheets. Even the SuperScale line is long gone, so they can sometimes make some money.